Well people are "sensitive" when rants are made which does not hold true...

FYI, I maintain ~20 Gentoo machines. 2/3 servers, 1/3 desktops.

The original comment holds piece of truth only if you use unstable packages - like I do on my main computer - because I like to try new things ahead of time. All others computers I run are using stable architecture packages only - and they are stable, easy to maintain (once a month is my preference). Also I do not see the spilting of a humongous package like Xorg into 100 small packages as bloating.

Gentoo allows you to do whatever you like. Choice between stable and unstable/masked packages is a USER choice._________________"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5

The meta-packaging system works fine, just because it doesn't work with ~arch doesn't mean it doesn't work.

There are several posts already that show you a simple BASH script to add all the entries for you into /etc/portage/package.keywords.

It does not. It contains no mechanism to cleanly uninstall modularized subsystem. And this is the major task the packaging system/distribution should excel at.

Actually the paradigm to use inner (between modules) dependencies as the main mechanism to pull in a susbsystem, well separated from the rest,
is plain broken, in my opinion. Because dependecy tree cannot, in general, be robustly reversed for deinstallation (you are always in danger to pick up some external, in addition to internal dependencies).

From what I've seen, the mod packages are somewhat new to Portage and Gentoo. No there is no good way to unmerge the whole package, but who would want to anyways? Seriously, think of it this way:

Lets say I want all of KDE's network apps:

emerge kdenetwork-meta

takes longer then

emerge kdenetwork

because of the time for configure and all that.

Meta packages are really just a cheap and easy way to see what all is there from what I've seen, or a quick way to get a working system._________________The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

The meta-packaging system works fine, just because it doesn't work with ~arch doesn't mean it doesn't work.

There are several posts already that show you a simple BASH script to add all the entries for you into /etc/portage/package.keywords.

It does not. It contains no mechanism to cleanly uninstall modularized subsystem. And this is the major task the packaging system/distribution should excel at.

Technically the meta packages aren't even packages and need not be in portage. The devs just through them in there for convenience of those people who wanted every package like with the monolithic package. (Who the hell uses every single KDE app in each meta anyways? )

Having the removal of the meta packages cause the removal of all split ebuilds installed by that meta is no different than the reverse dependency of any other package that is removed. You can argue that portage needs to handle this better, but this isn't really what we were discussing and isn't specific to the meta mechanism.

dmpogo wrote:

Actually the paradigm to use inner (between modules) dependencies as the main mechanism to pull in a susbsystem, well separated from the rest,
is plain broken, in my opinion. Because dependecy tree cannot, in general, be robustly reversed for deinstallation (you are always in danger to pick up some external, in addition to internal dependencies).

-*. Those who tries to solve the problems, and those who just shouts "DOESN'T WORK!!!"_________________"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent" - Marilyn vos Savant

I'm not a current gentoo user but I have to agree with a few (very few) of the things the original poster said. However I agree that creating posts like this is counter productive. I'm ussuming that the suggestion to create a "I HATE GENTOO" forum was just a joke The last time I tried gentoo was a few months ago. I kinda have the habbit of keeping a spare partition for installing differant distros periodically. Still like the one I'm using more though (for the record it's not Ubunto). Well anyways, doesn't emerge list what needs to be upgraded and the use flags it uses before anything is cast? I thought it did the last time I used it.

I'm not a current gentoo user but I have to agree with a few (very few) of the things the original poster said. However I agree that creating posts like this is counter productive. I'm ussuming that the suggestion to create a "I HATE GENTOO" forum was just a joke The last time I tried gentoo was a few months ago. I kinda have the habbit of keeping a spare partition for installing differant distros periodically. Still like the one I'm using more though (for the record it's not Ubunto). Well anyways, doesn't emerge list what needs to be upgraded and the use flags it uses before anything is cast? I thought it did the last time I used it.

emerge -upv world

that what you talking about?

If it hits a masked/~arch package, it kinda dies there, though._________________The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

It's sad to see what's happen with this community these days.
Some people point the gentoo weakness, and instead it be listened as a advise
that things need improvement ppl wish that he die horribly.
And even worse, they think that gentoo is only distro under the sun, all others sucks.

Before criticize they at least should know a bit more about others distros.
As example, slackware has third part package managers that track dependencies
as portage do, you don't need to track dependencies.

CheckInstall does a great job if you need to install a package from source in a
slackware based or a debian based distro.
It automatically compile and make a .deb or tgz package with no trouble.

Slackware share the same simplicity of gentoo, you need to configure almost everything
by hand, but slack still working after you update some packages.

Gentoo users need put their hands in some dirty to get bleeding edge things like XGL working.
N00bs can do the same in ubuntu without a CS master degree.

What about dependencies?
Try do a frugal gentoo install with a *box as desktop, without kde or gnome,
then try install a package that depends on some gnome libs.
To install tsclient in a ubuntu bare install it have only a dozen dependencies,
less than 10mb of files to donwload.
Try install the same package in gentoo.

If you don't have gnome installed, it needs tons of packages, half gnome and a
huge download to accomplish, not to mention the time to compile these dependencies,
not to mention the bloat.

Sounds stupid to me, too much to get a small program like tsclient.
Why in hell almost all gnome packages depend on gnome-desktop and gnome-panel?
Do i need install this crap to use a gnome app in fluxbox?
USE flags seems a shot in the foot.

What about virtual packages?
I want to use thttpd, a very small thttpd server with awstats but awstats
need's apache, because the f8cking virtual.

Isn't gentoo about the choices, to let the user decide what they want?

What about the bleeding edge distro?
Or i should say "not so" bleeding edge distro or " a bit outdated" bleeding edge distro?

The only way to use up to date packages is unmask it an run a mix of a stable install
mixed with lots of unstable packages.

And why in hell some packages take ages to be marked a stable?
How many times you want install a package, but its marked a unstable,
or only work if you install a dependency marked as unstable?

You know the rest, don't blame if you install unstable packages and it broke your system,
even if you are forced to install it to satisfy some dependencies.

Someone here tried gentoo64? its only usable if you unmask half of the packages.

Take a look at ubuntu, lots of packages marked as unstable in gentoo are in the current ubuntu repos.

And what about the worst nigthmare after dependency hell? the USE Flags hell?

Try USE flags per package, sounds really good, but in the pace that it changes,
and most part of time unnoticed, you will be in tigth pants soner or later.

Not to mention that my package.use has more than 100 packages.
Lots of things changed in these last years, and gentoo isn't the same distro that
claim to be fast, simple and that let the user have control over every aspect.

I kown its not a distro aimed to n00bs, slackware and arch linux aren't too.
why maintain a gentoo install working getting even hard?

People need to open their mind and eyes, not close their ears like we see in some posts here.
Gentoo really needs improvements, we see treads like these day after day not for nothing, its a advise.

Why not a precompiled packages repository, it don't need to be a official gentoo
repository, but community driven.

Lots of distro have unofficial packages repositories, look at Penguin Liberation Front as example.
It works very well, i can't see the point why gentoo haven't something like it, even after grow
with that huge user base like these days.

It seems that Gentoo is suffering the "Debian effect", a huge userbase, lots of packages avaliable,
a very outdated stable release, a comunity with a huge ego that thinks that its a perfect distro.

All critics should be shot in head after boiled in hot oil, long life gentoo.

It's sad to see what's happen with this community these days.
Some people point the gentoo weakness, and instead it be listened as a advise
that things need improvement ppl wish that he die horribly.

Well, the problem is that the critics are not exactly soft in their word choices either, there's more to constructive criticism than "it sucks and will ultimately die". I do agree that the original post, not regarding the title, does try to give advice instead of cursing.

Quote:

And even worse, they think that gentoo is only distro under the sun, all others sucks.

Sadly. But that's true for nearly anything under the sun, you will find windows users who say "Linux si teh suck", BSD users who say "Linux si teh suck", Debian users who say "Gentoo si teh suck", etc etc. As some people cannot stop to emphasize, Linux is about choice, so why not let everyone make their own choice?

Quote:

Gentoo users need put their hands in some dirty to get bleeding edge things like XGL working.
N00bs can do the same in ubuntu without a CS master degree.

Well, I guess the gentoo XGL crew simply lacks a few people that would build releases stable enough to get into portage.

Quote:

What about dependencies?
Try do a frugal gentoo install with a *box as desktop, without kde or gnome,
then try install a package that depends on some gnome libs.
To install tsclient in a ubuntu bare install it have only a dozen dependencies,
less than 10mb of files to donwload.
Try install the same package in gentoo.

If you don't have gnome installed, it needs tons of packages, half gnome and a
huge download to accomplish, not to mention the time to compile these dependencies,
not to mention the bloat.

Sounds stupid to me, too much to get a small program like tsclient.
Why in hell almost all gnome packages depend on gnome-desktop and gnome-panel?
Do i need install this crap to use a gnome app in fluxbox?
USE flags seems a shot in the foot.

I do absolutely agree on this one. USE flags may be great in theory, but the way they're now, they create as many problems as they solve. One of the biggest problem with them is that if you're merging a package with, say, 50 dependencies, you'd better check about all the USE flags you do not know. While this might be okay, we lack the tools to do this efficiently. euse -i for each flag is not very efficient, and the descriptions do really suck. Take imlib, and that's not the worst example:

imlib - Adds support for imlib, an image loading and rendering library - that's everything that euse -i tells me. Turns out I need this for kdegraphics(-meta) if I want kuickshow.

Quote:

What about the bleeding edge distro?
Or i should say "not so" bleeding edge distro or " a bit outdated" bleeding edge distro?

The only way to use up to date packages is unmask it an run a mix of a stable install
mixed with lots of unstable packages.

I think you're talking about kde for example, took quite long before 3.5 got stable, but I guess that problem finds its roots in the fact that gentoo is a sourcebased distro and the tree maintainers have to make sure it compiles cleanly against the other recent stuff. I can see that's more work than it is for a binary distro. Same goes for gcc4, I can perfectly understand why gentoo can not mark this stable as fast as other distros.

Quote:

People need to open their mind and eyes, not close their ears like we see in some posts here.
Gentoo really needs improvements, we see treads like these day after day not for nothing, its a advise.

Agree on that one.

Quote:

Why not a precompiled packages repository, it don't need to be a official gentoo
repository, but community driven.

Will absolutely NOT work if you want it to be stable. First, you lose the different CFLAGS, I don't think a communitydriven project can afford to have 9 repos just for the x86 subarchs. [Personally, I don't think that's a big problem. Imho archlinux is going the right way here with 586 repos.] Second, you will suffer USEflag breakage. If we cleaned up the USeflag-system, maybe. As it is right now, I don't think that would work.

just my $.02
Disclaimer: I do use and will continue using gentoo. This is NOT whining.

Gentoo users need put their hands in some dirty to get bleeding edge things like XGL working.
N00bs can do the same in ubuntu without a CS master degree.

Well, I guess the gentoo XGL crew simply lacks a few people that would build releases stable enough to get into portage.

Hrm. I'm not sure if I should take offense to this or not. I maintain Xgl for Gentoo (well at least 90% of Gentoo). If you ask the question "Can we maintain packages stable enough for portage?", the answer will always be "Doesn't matter. Gentoo won't allow Xgl in portage period, stable or not." because it hasn't been officially released and remains a branch of xorg-server. When it gets merged into the main branch (hopefully by the next xorg release) then it will be easy to have USE="xgl" enable it but for now, adding it as a separate package is (like Donnie Berkholz said) a complete hack. Ubuntu hacked it into their unstable release, well thats great but I guess you could say that Gentoo likes to do things "the right way" and not just hack stuff to make it work.

By the way, if you think you can help make things more stable, I'm actively looking for help in this area (due to real life, I literally have no time to work on anything but ebuild maintenance).

Gentoo users need put their hands in some dirty to get bleeding edge things like XGL working.
N00bs can do the same in ubuntu without a CS master degree.

Well, I guess the gentoo XGL crew simply lacks a few people that would build releases stable enough to get into portage.

Hrm. I'm not sure if I should take offense to this or not. I maintain Xgl for Gentoo (well at least 90% of Gentoo). If you ask the question "Can we maintain packages stable enough for portage?", the answer will always be "Doesn't matter. Gentoo won't allow Xgl in portage period, stable or not." because it hasn't been officially released and remains a branch of xorg-server. When it gets merged into the main branch (hopefully by the next xorg release) then it will be easy to have USE="xgl" enable it but for now, adding it as a separate package is (like Donnie Berkholz said) a complete hack. Ubuntu hacked it into their unstable release, well thats great but I guess you could say that Gentoo likes to do things "the right way" and not just hack stuff to make it work.

By the way, if you think you can help make things more stable, I'm actively looking for help in this area (due to real life, I literally have no time to work on anything but ebuild maintenance).

Joined: 28 Mar 2006Posts: 391Location: Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:47 pm Post subject:

revertex wrote:

It's sad to see what's happen with this community these days.
Some people point the gentoo weakness, and instead it be listened as a advise
that things need improvement ppl wish that he die horribly.
And even worse, they think that gentoo is only distro under the sun, all others sucks.

Before criticize they at least should know a bit more about others distros.
As example, slackware has third part package managers that track dependencies
as portage do, you don't need to track dependencies.

CheckInstall does a great job if you need to install a package from source in a
slackware based or a debian based distro.
It automatically compile and make a .deb or tgz package with no trouble.

Slackware share the same simplicity of gentoo, you need to configure almost everything
by hand, but slack still working after you update some packages.

Most of us are here because we're not satisfied with other distro's.

Quote:

Gentoo users need put their hands in some dirty to get bleeding edge things like XGL working.
N00bs can do the same in ubuntu without a CS master degree.

The wiki guide is perfectly coherent, if you can't follow it then you probably shouldn't be running such an unstable package as XGL. Ubuntu has it easier as they have prebuilt binaries, so their systems are roughly similar.

Quote:

What about dependencies? Try do a frugal gentoo install with a *box as desktop, without kde or gnome,
then try install a package that depends on some gnome libs.
To install tsclient in a ubuntu bare install it have only a dozen dependencies,
less than 10mb of files to donwload.
Try install the same package in gentoo.

If you don't have gnome installed, it needs tons of packages, half gnome and a
huge download to accomplish, not to mention the time to compile these dependencies,
not to mention the bloat.

Sounds stupid to me, too much to get a small program like tsclient.
Why in hell almost all gnome packages depend on gnome-desktop and gnome-panel?
Do i need install this crap to use a gnome app in fluxbox?

When you're building from source, you need various headers provided by other packages (e.g. Gnome). You also need need the libraries they provide (kdelibs anyone?), and the packages won't work without them. There are generally decent alternatives to all DE linked packages, you just need to do a bit more research.

Quote:

USE flags seems a shot in the foot.

The whole point of USE flags is to reduce bloat, by only enabling features that you need, rather than having a package that caters to everyone's needs. Put simply, its the Gentoo Way (tm), and it works for everyone else.

Quote:

What about virtual packages?
I want to use thttpd, a very small thttpd server with awstats but awstats
need's apache, because the f8cking virtual.

Looks like a bug.

Quote:

Isn't gentoo about the choices, to let the user decide what they want?

What choice is Gentoo denying you? You can move the awstats ebuild to an overlay, and remove the dependency on Apache if you want, its likely just to break awstats.

Quote:

What about the bleeding edge distro?
Or i should say "not so" bleeding edge distro or " a bit outdated" bleeding edge distro?

You can say what you want, but things like the uptake of GCC 4.1, modular Xorg, KDE 3.5 etc, show that Gentoo is still very much at the forefront of its niche.

Quote:

The only way to use up to date packages is unmask it an run a mix of a stable install
mixed with lots of unstable packages.

Up to date packages are more unstable by definition, they have had less testing and may break things. The whole reason they're marked unstable is for your benifit, if you want to take the risks, run a ~arch system.

Quote:

And why in hell some packages take ages to be marked a stable?
How many times you want install a package, but its marked a unstable,
or only work if you install a dependency marked as unstable?

Unfortunately that is an issue with Gentoo, but its a staffing issue. If you wanna help get more things stablised quicker, why not sign up as an arch tester?

Quote:

You know the rest, don't blame if you install unstable packages and it broke your system,
even if you are forced to install it to satisfy some dependencies.

Someone here tried gentoo64? its only usable if you unmask half of the packages.

I'd imagine gentoo64 is probably unstable, so it doesn't surprise me in the slightest you've had to unmask a load of packages to get it working. If you think thats a pain, try Gentoo FreeBSD

Quote:

Take a look at ubuntu, lots of packages marked as unstable in gentoo are in the current ubuntu repos.

And what about the worst nigthmare after dependency hell? the USE Flags hell?

Try USE flags per package, sounds really good, but in the pace that it changes,
and most part of time unnoticed, you will be in tigth pants soner or later.

Not to mention that my package.use has more than 100 packages.
Lots of things changed in these last years, and gentoo isn't the same distro that
claim to be fast, simple and that let the user have control over every aspect.

I don't see how you arrived at this conclusion. Its not easy, I'll grant you that, but it does give you massive control. The whole point of package.use is to grant you this control. To be brutally honest, it doesn't sound as if Gentoo is for you.

Quote:

I kown its not a distro aimed to n00bs, slackware and arch linux aren't too.
why maintain a gentoo install working getting even hard?

People need to open their mind and eyes, not close their ears like we see in some posts here.
Gentoo really needs improvements, we see treads like these day after day not for nothing, its a advise.

Why don't you post some constructive criticism then, instead of pointing out all the things that make Gentoo unique (Portage, USE flags, building from source) and saying they're wrong.

Quote:

Why not a precompiled packages repository

What would be the point of that in a source-based distro?

Quote:

Lots of distro have unofficial packages repositories, look at Penguin Liberation Front as example.
It works very well, i can't see the point why gentoo haven't something like it, even after grow
with that huge user base like these days.

There are lots of unofficial package repositories, BMG and Sunrise being two examples.

Quote:

It seems that Gentoo is suffering the "Debian effect", a huge userbase, lots of packages avaliable,
a very outdated stable release, a comunity with a huge ego that thinks that its a perfect distro.

Its the perfect distro for us. If it doesn't suite you as well as Ubuntu, you're welcome to use Ubuntu, no-ones forcing you to use Gentoo.

Someone here tried gentoo64? its only usable if you unmask half of the packages.

Do you even know what you are talking about !!! These baseless rant are annoying....

I run a stable amd64 computer at work. Workstation settings with Gnome. I have ZERO unmask packages !! and only 8 packages keyworded ~amd64. None of these 8 are mandatory - the ONLY needed one for me was ncpfs for interaction with Novell server.

So let me return the question: Did you tried gentoo64 ??

PS: if your comment was based on test of amd64 from last year, well, welcome to a fast evolving distribution _________________"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5

Someone here tried gentoo64? its only usable if you unmask half of the packages.

Do you even know what you are talking about !!! These baseless rant are annoying....

I run a stable amd64 computer at work. Workstation settings with Gnome. I have ZERO unmask packages !! and only 8 packages keyworded ~amd64. None of these 8 are mandatory - the ONLY needed one for me was ncpfs for interaction with Novell server.

So let me return the question: Did you tried gentoo64 ??

PS: if your comment was based on test of amd64 from last year, well, welcome to a fast evolving distribution

Short answer, yes.

At that time xorg was unstable. period.

I'm glad to see about a big jump like this after long time of slow progress.

I don't now how precompiled packages will break the system, i'm not talking about big packages like xorg, kdelibs et all, but small packages.
Someone here that have used alien to convert deb packages know that some precompiled packages will not meld yor box.
As example, openoffice, firefox-bin, maya, Enemy territory and some others that i can remember at the top of my mind comes precompiled and works fine.

Someone here tried gentoo64? its only usable if you unmask half of the packages.

Do you even know what you are talking about !!! These baseless rant are annoying....

I run a stable amd64 computer at work. Workstation settings with Gnome. I have ZERO unmask packages !! and only 8 packages keyworded ~amd64. None of these 8 are mandatory - the ONLY needed one for me was ncpfs for interaction with Novell server.

So let me return the question: Did you tried gentoo64 ??

PS: if your comment was based on test of amd64 from last year, well, welcome to a fast evolving distribution

I think s/he meant keyword rather than unmask and I do agree with that statement. To use AMD64 Gentoo on a desktop machine you DO have to keyword a LOT of packages (unless you don't like having anything installed). After a short time I had about 10, 15 things keyworded, at which point I just changed to ~ globally. So it's far from a baseless rant.

So it's not unmasked, it's keyworded, and it's not half, it's 10 packages... so indeed it's a rant with exaggerated number... thanks for correcting me _________________"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5

I think s/he meant keyword rather than unmask and I do agree with that statement. To use AMD64 Gentoo on a desktop machine you DO have to keyword a LOT of packages (unless you don't like having anything installed). After a short time I had about 10, 15 things keyworded, at which point I just changed to ~ globally. So it's far from a baseless rant.

Hmm, that's strange as I've been running a amd64 box for some time and the only ~amd64 packages are ones that are usually unsupported stuff like gfxboot.
(Any I have ~arch could be removed and the package would be virtualling identical to the arch version. eg k3b-0.12.16 instead of k3b-0.14.14)
And its a complete KDE system.

Funny thing is I just installed kubuntu on a client machine and while browsing the forums at the ubuntu web site for some answers to a few issues I had, I came across the same series of these threads: ubuntu sucks because, I'm leaving ubuntu, etc.
The only difference to the Gentoo threads is the responses seem to be a little tamer, and it seems that the moderators tend to merge all those threads as they say they're just the same outdated, exaggerated, and useless threads over and over again.

For what it's worth, I maintain a couple Gentoo boxes which are both the smallest installations I've ever made. Not only does Gentoo make the installation of a minimal box possible, they make it fairly easy. They also make it trivial to add another package, which is difficult on some distros.

Keeping a small installation is easy -- don't keep adding packages just because you might look at it someday, or because you don't know what it's for. To date my biggest world file contains 33 packages, and emerge -pet yields 184 ebuilds. The configuration and control mechanisms are simple and elegant. The amount of maintenance I have to do is lower than any other distro's maintenance if you exclude compile time. Other operating systems are vulnerable to breakage too, and that includes Microsoft and every other OS vendor I've used software from.

It seems like the original poster originally wanted to tinker with Gentoo, and then later decided that the benefits of that much control were not worth the cost of exercising that control. That's fine, but please just go find some other distro that suits you better rather than bash something that works well for a lot of people. Gentoo is at or near one extreme of preference, but for some of us it's just exactly what the doctor ordered. Yes, it would be nice if things worked better, but that's why people are still working on it.

There are very few choices for those of us who want this degree of control over the installed software we use. Watching somebody get abusive about a distro because it has flaws is unpleasant, and the thought that the maintainers might get discouraged because of that abuse makes a lot of us get defensive. It's particularly bad when the thing listed as a flaw is one of the main features of the distro. I for one don't want Gentoo to go away, and I don't want it to become more mainstream at the cost of control, either. The answer for you is to just find another distribution that fits your needs better, so why make all this fuss? At the very least, offer constructive criticism in a positive demeanor instead of dire predictions and flames.